Not Enough or The Ghosts of Christmases Past

Last night my Mom hosted a little shindig with some of our closest friends, hers and mine. I’ve mentioned before how we’ve moved around a fair bit, and although I lived in Houston for nigh on twelve years it just so happened that many, if not most, of my friends moved around a fair bit too. The result of all this moving and shaking is that I have very, very few childhood friends.

But yesterday I got to spend the evening with some of my best friends in Houston, some of which I’d lost contact with for a few years and others that I’d kept up with despite the distance in both time and space. It made me feel like a whole person again and yet it made me feel all broken apart too. Each of them had an anecdote, a memory of my family, of the person I was before the person I’ve become. And I wonder what they see now. Am I still some version of the girl they knew? Or have I morphed into a completely different human being?

I’ve only been here a week, and yet, I’ve already started getting a bit melancholic for the life that could have been. I’ve always suffered from the “what ifs”, and now, now that my family’s changed, now that my mom lives here permanently again, now that (due to the husband’s health situation) I likely never will live here again, now I feel them more than ever. What if I hadn’t gone to Italy for University, what if I hadn’t married the husband and stayed there, what if I’d come home sooner, what if he hadn’t had leukemia, what could have been of this life I live?

When you grow up in a multi-ethnic household, when you live here and there and everywhere you end up always feeling a little lost. I’m not Italian, I’m not Brazilian, I’m not American, I’m a little bit of everything and a little bit of nothing and it’s hard to stick a definition on it. It’s hard for me to stick a definition on myself, it’s hard to find something that fits. I spend so much of my time in Italy daydreaming about coming to America, about coming home, that it surprises me that when I finally get here I could possibly be so adrift. All the insecurities of the child I was, the child that arrived from Italy, with her loud, vivacious, oh so Italian father and her exotic mother, the child that spoke with a heavy British accent, that struggled to fit in, all those insecurities of years spent never really fitting in come rushing back to the surface.

Starting the year like this frightens me. Always wondering if I’ve done enough in the past, if I’m doing enough right now, if I am enough as I am, it’s tiring and scary and very, very unsettling at my age. Am I pretty enough, am I thin enough, am I elegant enough, am I intelligent enough, am I interesting enough, am I well-read and well-bred enough, am I loving enough, am I compassionate enough, am I patient enough…. I could go on and on and on, and the answer to most of those questions is no. 

It’s a little bit sad and a little bit startling to me that when faced with the ghosts of Christmases past the thought that underlies all my emotions, my words and my actions, at the end of the day is am I good enough? And I don’t like the answer.

There, but for the grace of God

A few days ago I ran into a lady I know, and I found out that she recently lost her husband. Her husband had cancer, from asbestos. They diagnosed him last December, he passed in August. She’s doing what any of us would be doing in her place, she’s going to work, going about her daily activities, doing what needs to be done, she’s holding up, she’s… surviving…

But she’s devastated, she looks terrible, she’s aged, and her eyes are sad. Her eyes are vast pits of sadness, I could barely stand to look into them, such was the loneliness, the hopelessness, the unadulterated, boundless, inexplicable, all-encompassing despair.

Seeing her didn’t so much as take my breath away as it quite simply sucked it so violently out of my ribcage I wondered if I would ever breath again. I had no words, no comfort to give, nothing to offer that could possibly make her feel better, because, let’s be honest nothing will make her feel better for a really, really long time.

And all throughout this brief encounter, as I let her talk because talking about it seemed what she needed in that moment, as I looked at her, tried to show her support, tried to express something, anything that would show her I cared, a teeny voice whispered in my ear… “there, but for the grace of God, go I”.

Linking up today with Shell at Things I Can't Say

Living with Leukemia part 8: The Ugly Truth

The thing about cancer is that it completely changes your life, whether you’re the one to have it or someone close to you. What’s surprising is the extent to which it changes you, I can honestly say that I’m a completely different person now than I was two years ago, and I have no idea whether I will ever go back to being the person that I was then. Probably not. Another surprising thing is that, at least in my case, most of the changes aren’t positive, I truly wish I hadn’t become this way.

I used to be pretty judgmental, motherhood took care of some of that attitude, and then cancer took care of the rest, so you won’t find me judging as readily anymore. At the beginning of this whole cancer debacle I was talking to my therapist and telling her I was upset with myself cause I felt like I wasn’t doing enough, and that it bothered me how often people would come up to me and say I was so strong, and I was dealing with this so well and what with a new baby and all, and my answer was always, well, what the hell else am I supposed to do? And my therapist said that I’d be surprised at how many people leave when they find themselves in my situation. 

Obviously, my initial reaction was disbelief, I mean, really leaving a loved one who’s just been diagnosed with leukemia? Who does that? What sort of horrible human being abandons another in a time of need? And then you start hearing things, because you start paying attention, and you realized that you’re surrounded by “people who leave”, the husband who runs off never to be heard from again when his wife is diagnosed with breast cancer, the girlfriend who breaks off the engagement… there are so many, more than one can even imagine. I was appalled, who does such a horrible thing, I’d think, why would you react like that, how can you leave?

They say you shouldn’t judge until you’ve walked a mile in another man’s shoes, right? Well, now I’ve walked that mile, and I’m not so quick to judge. Cancer changes things, a lot. It’s a long, sad and sorry process with no guarantee of anything at the end. There are days, there are many days, when I wish I could be one of those people who leave. Have I shocked you?

Cancer changes things. I love my husband, I always will, he’s the father of my children, but we’re barely husband and wife anymore. We live our lives beside each other, but not together anymore, and we have no energy and no hope to look to the future anymore. So, yeah, the truth is sometimes I wish I could leave because I’ve realized that leaving would be so much easier. 

A few weeks ago, at my Mom’s wedding, one of my cousins who I hadn’t seen in years, said to me that I was the column of the family, always taking care of things, always doing what I’m supposed to. How sad is that? But, uncomfortably true. I need to take care of things, make them work, make them right. I’m not a person who leaves, but god do I wish I was.

I got an email a few weeks ago from a girl who reads this blog, I have yet to find the words to answer her. She finds herself in a situation similar to mine, which in a way was comforting to me because it made me feel much less lonely; now I’m not going to get all up in her business here because it’s not my place, but her email got me thinking (among many, many things) this: her boyfriend has leukemia with a very similar path to my husband’s but the thing is, they hadn’t been together very long when this all started for them, they’d only recently moved in together… and lately all I want to say to her with all the strength in my body is get out, get out while you still can. I can’t even imagine facing this whole, long, terrible ordeal without the strength of years together to help you through. I’m barely making it and I’ve been with the husband for twelve years, we have two kids, we stood up in front of church and state and swore to stay together in sickness and in health. And most of the time I feel like I’m a strong wind away from it all falling apart. 

But the truth is, I don’t think she’s one of the people who leave either.

I realize there’s no limitation period for leaving, one can up and go at any time, but there are people who can and people who can’t. Sometimes I try and look to the future and it depresses me to no end, because this illness is one step forward two steps back the whole way. Last year I used to think in terms of when the husband gets better, when we’ll get back to normal, when we’ll be able to do this or that, this year, after the second transplant, I cautiously thought if we get back to normal, but now, now I have no hope. Nothing specific has happened, his blood work is good, but he still feels pretty consistently like shit. And let me tell you, a person who feels like shit all the time tends to be an asshole most of the time. Through no fault of his, let’s be clear, but still it’s a normal and consistent reaction.

And now before you judge me, think, seriously think about living with someone who feels ill most of the time, who can’t eat because most foods and smells disgust him and you’re the one cooking, who acts normally one minute and then yells at you the next because he’s trying to act normal but snaps because he’s just uncomfortable all the time, but you’re the one getting snapped at, who always shuts you down when you suggest something because his initial reaction to everything is negative. Of course I understand that he’s like this because he feels like crap ALL THE TIME. I get it. And I also realize that I can’t really know how he feels, because, well, I’m not in his shoes, and I don’t want to be, I thank God every day that I’m not. I get that it’s not his fault. I get that he’s struggling more than I am. I get it. My brain understands all of it, I swear, but my heart is tired and sad and lonely. Cancer changes things more than I thought possible, and now I’ve found myself waking up in a panic at night wondering if things will ever go back, if they will ever get better. And that’s why I wish I was one of the people who leave. Because if you leave you may well feel guilty and ashamed but you’re living your life, you’re working towards something, you’ve got a future to build and at this point I honestly can’t say which is the better trade off.

The point is moot, of course, cause I can’t leave. I don’t know if it’s genetic wiring, if it’s an overwhelming sense of duty, if it’s love, but for now leaving is not an option for me, but let’s not judge too harshly the people who can and do leave. Having cancer is terrible, it’s undeniably worst for the person who has it than for anyone else around them, but being the person taking care of things, picking up the slack, being the sounding board, the shoulder to cry on and the punching bag isn’t exactly a walk in the park either. Being the person next to someone who is fighting cancer is sad, and frustrating, and exasperating, and tiring, and it’s very, very lonely. Cancer changes everything, and that, my friends, is the ugly truth.




I'm linking up today with Shell at Things I Can't Say.

Living with Leukemia. Part 7. Loneliness

Loneliness is a sad, sorry state. I’ve always been wary of being alone. I left my family when I was relatively young, but I was lucky enough and patient enough to build strong relationships with friends and long-distance relationships with family because I never wanted to be alone. I got married, started a family of my own and thought I really would never be alone. But then, years in, I realized that we are, in fact, always alone. 

Someone once said to me that I needed to harden myself against this fear because in the end everyone dies alone and there’s neither shame nor sorrow in living alone. This thought always made me a little sad. Then something happens, in my case it was the Husband’s illness… and I’m back at the idea of being alone.

The reality of this phase in our lives is that he’s alone with his illness, his recovery, his fight I can only sit by and observe, try to help, but in the end I can’t really know how he feels and by the same token, I’m alone on my end, he doesn’t know how I feel, how it’s affected me nor does he, or probably should he, care.

How to deal, how to claw my way out of this incomparable sadness, out of this quite possibly unjustified sadness, is a mystery to me. I often find myself looking at my life like I’m looking in a mirror towards a parallel dimension, another me, smiling, taking care of her children, her family, doing everyday mundane things, enjoying a holiday, talking to friends, and then there’s me, looking through the glass, a little sad, a little melancholic a knot in my throat that won’t let me cry but won’t go away either. A constant undercurrent of tension, clenched teeth, always, slightly on edge, possibly not enough to warrant real worry, but just enough to take the joy out of things. 

I’m often confronted by the idea that the person I married, my other half, isn’t there for me, can’t be there for me, not right now anyway and I wonder what to do when I’m the one adrift. I don’t want to whine, I don’t want to assign blame where no blame can be assigned, but I feel how I feel and there’s not an awful lot I can do about it. So what do I do about it?

I find myself looking at other people now, people around me, working, living, smiling, doing their thing and I wonder if maybe they’re a little sad too, I search strangers’ faces wondering if maybe their smile doesn’t quite reach their eyes, and wondering how they do it, how they plod through their days, how they sleep through their nights. And I feel guilty (when don’t I?) because I think how lucky we are, the husband’s here, with us, my children are healthy and a joy to raise, we’re solvent, we have jobs to go to, a roof over our heads, no major crises befall us and yet the constant, relentless sadness sucking at my soul, making me feel so lonely I could cry but actually can’t. It’s inexplicable and inescapable and leaves me wondering what I should do.

Awards, confessions and blog love

Oh me, oh my, I posted three days in a row, what could possibly be going on with me, it’s not like I can use my blog to get out of work, can I ?!?! (If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about read here.)

The truth is that the lovely Bridget from Twinisms, the courageous mom of, get this (and you may actually want to be sitting down before you continue reading), two sets of twins – ok I’ll just give you a minute to let that sink in – was so kind as to pass on a blogging award to me (well actually two bloggy awards, anyhoo). Now, not only is this incredibly flattering (to me) and sweet (of her) but it’s also fun because in accordance to the rules of acceptance of these awards I must tell you seven things you don’t know about me, and then pass them on to other bloggers I love, kind of like a chain letter but without all the annoying threats of apocalyptic bad luck to those who don’t play.

   

So here goes nothing, seven things you may not know about me:

1. I am a technology junkie. I don’t go anywhere without my iphone, ipad and kindle (as well as my MacBook Air, as often as not). I’m not kidding, I stack them up just so and carry them around the house with me, from room to room, like a weird and articulated security blanket.

2. I won’t go to sleep without having a snack first. Ever. Most of the time (when I’m motivated) it’ll be a zone diet approved snack, so no guilt, but some of the time it’s just plain junk – twizzlers, goldfish crackers, nutrageous – right before going to sleep, for maximum calorie assimilation. This probably explains why I’m losing weight at a snail’s pace.

3. Never so much as right after my wedding did I use the phrase “I should’ve listened to my Mother”. It infuriates me, but the few things that went wrong were the ones in which I completely disregarded her advice. Sigh. Let this be a lesson to any young bride- to-be out there reading this, when in doubt call my mother.

4. I was very insecure in high school and through most of college, this led to some pretty erratic behavior and a lot of embarrassment when I think back to that time. I sometimes wish I could get a do-over, but with my present day self-assuredness and a healthy dose of humility.

5. I don’t like dogs. There I said it, you can leave now. I don’t hate them or anything, and I don’t have anything against them or their owners, I just don’t want one in my life. Ever. Never ever. And I’m pretty frightened by the fact that my daughter loves them.

6. I don’t shave my legs as often as I should. In fact, I never wear skirts for this precise reason. If you see me in pants (that’ll be trousers for the Brits reading this, not underwear, you’ll never see me in my underwear!) you can bet I’ve got all sorts of hairy legs going on underneath there. I know, it’s gross; I just can’t be bothered.

7. Even though I’m well on my way towards middle age when I think of myself, what I can do, what adventures, opportunities and discoveries are still before me I clearly envision myself as a twenty year old. Does this make me delusional or wise, I wonder?

There you go, now you know me way better than you may have ever desired to… lucky you! And now it’s time to share a little blog love, so go check out my blog friends:

I’m so Fancy – because we should all get to live like the rich, though we may only do it vicariously.

The Nero Chronicles – because the occasional dose of beautiful things and beautiful words can turn around the dreariest of days.

Nuts about food – because who doesn’t need some inspiration in the kitchen sometimes, right?

In Bloom . because it’s sweet and fun and wholesome.

And baby cakes three – because her food is yummy and her pictures gorgeous what more could one ask for?

Lemon Gloria – because she’s funny, and real, oh and funny. Trust me.

Mother’s always right – because her baby is really cute, plus apparently she won’t clap for mommy but will clap for everyone else so this woman needs us. Also, she occasionally tells naked stories involving hot firemen. Need I say more?

There are so many more blogs I love, but I had to cap it off at seven, so there ya have it. Oh, and don’t get used to this whole posting everyday thing, cause that’s so not going to continue!

No woman no cry

The original title of this post was “Heartbreak, a little piece at a time” but then I went and got inspired by the king of reggae of all people. This post has been a weeklong work in progress, so if it sounds fragmented, well, it’s because it is. Let’s just say it reflects how my feelings have evolved throughout the week.

My chest hurts. It physically hurts though there is no physical reason for it. My sternum feels like it’s been whacked repeatedly, it feels bruised; it hurts at the slightest touch. I debated with myself long and hard about whether I wanted to write this post or not, it’s almost too personal for my personal blog, but at the same time the reason why I started blogging was to have a place where I could write what I couldn’t say out loud. That’s why I don’t use our names… but then I went and told everyone I know about it and now I find myself wondering whether I can talk about whatever I want or not cause I’m not just communicating with strangers, I’m also communicating with friends and family. The conclusion I came to was that I’m thirty five years old and I need to be able to communicate what I need to communicate without having to worry about anybody’s opinion, or judgment. It just means that my friends and my family may find out something new about me, because at the end of the day, those people who judge will judge me whether I speak my mind or not, so I might as well vent in the process.

So let me tell you why my chest hurts. Many moons ago a Chinese doctor told me that the center of the chest, the sternum, represents our emotions, our feelings. It’s where we send (or more precisely, block) all that emotional energy that we don’t want to, or simply can’t, deal with. I’m a huge repressor of my feelings, I always have been, so my chest has often hurt, off and on. Obviously lately I’ve had to keep it together, be strong, be centered, and you can’t do that if your emotions are all over the place, so you repress them. And that’s why my chest hurts. And that’s why I don’t want to talk about the husband’s illness this time around.

I’ll write about it till my finger’s cramp, but I do not want to talk about it, because I’ll start crying and I won’t be able to stop. All this to say, don’t ask me about the husband, please, again, I will keep everyone posted. If you really can’t help yourself, send me an email but don’t make me talk about it cause I can’t.

What prompted this post? What’s so personal that I can’t talk about it?

Well, Sunday was our last day together, we celebrated Easter, we spent a gorgeous day with absolutely beautiful weather together. And the husband packed his bag. As he was packing his bag he started quietly crying. Now think about this for a sec, you walk into your bedroom and your husband, your man, your rock, your soul mate is packing his bag for the hospital and he’s crying. He’s crying because he doesn’t want to leave his family, he doesn’t want to be ill, he doesn’t want to be shut up in a sterile room for a month, and then another month, he doesn’t want to feel like shit run over again, he’s scared and angry and afraid he’s never going to get better. And tell me, tell me if it doesn’t feel like your heart is going to implode in your chest.

There is nothing I can do. There is nothing I can say to make him feel better, to make it easier, and it breaks my heart.

The unfairness of it all has no explanation, no meaning, nothing that we can cling to and say if we do this or that everything will be alright in the end, because we have no way of knowing. I guess what’s different the second time you hear the doctors say leukemia is that you simply don’t go in with the same blind hope that in the end everything will be alright, because, quite simply, we have no way of knowing.

Now this post has been in the making for a few days, it’s been read, and re-read, written and re-written and what I can say at this point is that now that he’s in the hospital both the husband’s mood and my own have improved greatly. Dreading something is much harder than actually living it. When you’re weathering the storm you’re too busy to worry about the water seeping under the doorframe, so to speak. Whereas when you’re waiting for it, sitting in front of the weather channel going “oh shit, the hurricane’s coming” it feels like the worst thing in the world. So, here we are in the middle of the freaking hurricane.

You know, many months ago I read a blog post where the author was talking about a friend who was fighting cancer or something like that, I can’t remember, but what stuck to my mind is an idea she put forth in her post I think it may even have been the title of the post: “It’s better than chemo” and the sense was that we complain daily about hundreds of little annoyances but really if we compare them to having to undergo treatment for cancer they really start to seem insignificant.  And so I started saying it to myself, in my head, occasionally: “the baby kept me up all night… well, it’s better than chemo”, “I have to work late again, eh, it’s better than chemo”, “the car won’t start…”, “that asshole cut me off…”, “I lost my keys…” most things are actually better than chemo, except possibly the alternative to having chemo if you have cancer (i.e. death). It really puts a lot of things into perspective.

I guess that my long and rambling point is that cancer sucks, it sucks that the husband is back in the hospital, it sucks horribly that he’s not yet forty, has two small children and a wife who loves him more than even she thought possible (that would be me) and he has such an aggressive, recurring, crappity crap pot leukemia that won’t leave us the hell alone, it sucks beyond what is humanly imaginable that he has to go through the whole treatment again after less than a year but it sucks infinitely, monumentally less than the alternative, doesn’t it?

So there you go, despite my best intentions of writing a sad, sad post, it seems that the silver lining is always lurking somewhere in the back of my mind. I guess this is what I want to leave with you today, as a sort of hat tipping to my dad and to the husband, the two most optimistic people on the planet, there is always some good to be found in hardship. And that is what we must grab ahold of with all our strength, because in the end, thinking of the good is what gets us through it.

My heart breaks every time I see the husband in pain, or upset, or dreading the chemo, the endless transfusions, the loss of his hair and his strength and his will, and yet we treasure the time we get together when I visit in the hospital, quiet time, just he and I, to talk and dream and plan our future together whatever and whenever it may be. Because though it’s true that we’ve lost the blind hope of the newbies we still need to hope, believe and have faith that in the end “everything’s gonna be alright” because that’s what life is all about (or so Bob Marley says).

Breathe

I can’t sleep. If I wake up at night, and I’m doing an awful lot of that cause the kids seem to have picked up on the tension and call me two or three times a night, I can’t go back to sleep. I think of all the things we could’ve done or should’ve done or need to do before the husband goes back into the hospital (sometime next week). 
Saturday we met up with some good friends from Milan. We decided to have a picnic at the beach. And I started stressing about it Friday. I hope it’s sunny, the husband needs some sun before he gets shut up in the sterile room, I hope the kids are good, he needs to relax, I hope everything goes well… Basically a recipe for disaster, I worked myself up to such a state of agitation that I spent the entire day feeling sick, my stomach in knots, angry at the weather for being crappy, wondering if maybe we should go somewhere else where it was more sunny, and generally not enjoying a minute of the outing.

All for absolutely no reason, cause I can’t control the weather and other people and the husband would probably have had a much more enjoyable time if his wife had been a little less neurotic and sleep deprived.

The fact is there’s a clock ticking above my head, counting down to Thursday or Friday when he has to be admitted in the hospital. The doctor’s keep moving the dates up, he was supposed to do the biopsy on Wednesday but now they’re saying Tuesday’s better and it’s driving me insane because I feel like there’s no time. It’s good that they’re on top of the ball, trying to get everything done as soon as possible, they’ve been telling us from the start how important it is to get in there as quickly as possible, but at the same time I want to say, no stop, we need more time why are you rushing like this, is there something you haven’t told us?

The husband turns to me, more and more often, and says:  breathe. Because apparently I hold my breath, constantly, like that will somehow stop time: oh, I’m not breathing hence time isn’t passing. Totally ridiculous, I know, and yet at times it’s just easier to not breathe.

Faith

Faith is a funny thing, you either have it or you don’t. My parents were both raised Catholic, neither one in particularly religious homes, just your run of the mill, church on special occasions, no meat on Fridays Catholics. Due to a slew of reasons I’m not going to get into, my parents decided not to baptize me or my younger brother. They instilled a certain amount of respect towards the Church, and most of our values are Christian values, but religion was never really a big thing at our house. And right now, I’m not sure this was a good thing. You see, I was raised without the church (a church, any church) so I don’t really feel the need for it now, I have almost no relationship to it. I have little patience for some of the more, let’s call them “old-fashioned” views the Catholic church holds, and I simply feel no need for organized religion. I respect it, my parents taught me that much, in fact, I respect all religions, I am fascinated by how deeply religion and cultural heritage are intertwined. In fact, I kind of miss it, and sometimes wish my parents had made more of an effort to bring religion into our lives. You could say that I’m an agnostic of sorts, I really don’t know what’s out there, if anything, I like the idea of there being a “God”, but I can’t honestly say whether I really believe in him (her, it) or not. I don’t have faith, and I wish I did, in something, anything, cause sometimes in life you need it.

This is why I decided to baptize my kids, we live in Italy, so there isn’t much choice, Italians are catholic. But I didn’t really care which religion my children were raised in, compatibly with our culture, of course, I just wanted them to be part of something, some sort of community, an ideal. My parents are Catholic, my husband is Catholic, so my kids will take the sacraments and go to catechism and learn about their religion, I will take them to church and hope that they learn to have faith in it, in God, in something. Until the day that they are old enough to decide what they want to do with their spiritual selves, the important thing for me, for now, is that they learn to have faith, that they nurture their spiritual selves and when they’re grown they’ll decide. Because, unfortunately, I don’t have faith and I honestly believe it has a lot to do with the way I was raised, I wasn’t taught it, it wasn’t part of my life, and it’s not something that comes easily (or at all) to me. This is a difficult post to write, I’ll explain what prompted it, maybe it’ll be easier for me to get my point across (there is one, a long-winded one, so bear with me!).

This morning I found out one of my neighbors passed away. She was in her late fifties, had lung cancer, did the chemo and seemed to be in remission. I didn’t know her very well, but she was the first neighbor I met when we moved here, she was the first person to welcome us to the neighborhood, she always went out of her way to say hi, and have a quick chat, whenever I ran into her, she was a genuinely nice lady. I saw her a few weeks ago and she was in great spirits, she thought she had the cancer beat, whenever she ran into the husband she would say to him “you’ll see, we’ll be fine, you and I, we’ll get better”. And then she found out the cancer had spread to her brain, and yesterday she passed away. Another neighbor came by to give me the news this morning, and she apologized, because she didn’t want to be giving me bad news after the year we had. I thought that was strange, everyone has bad years and good years, and last year was certainly better for me than for my neighbor’s family that is now dealing with this terrible loss.

So anyway today’s news prompted me to start counting my blessings, of course, and during a phone call to a friend I mentioned all this and added that I wasn’t so upset anymore at having been up all night with a sick baby, because I got to cuddle the girl and hold her and breath her in and that’s a blessing in itself, and we forget how lucky we really are when life, with all its minor inconveniences takes over. And my friend mentioned how it was strange that life’s little inconveniences still take over and we forget our blessings after all we’d been through.

And finally I get to the point of this. This afternoon the husband came home early (we were supposed to go to Tai chi) and announced that the hospital had called, and his last bone marrow biopsy turned up a small amount of malformed cells. So the doc suggested we go in and have a chat. I felt like my blood was freezing in my veins. And then I went into panic mode, followed swiftly by anger mode, followed swiftly by fear mode. The husband stayed surprisingly calm. And this prompted today’s little mental loop on faith, because throughout his illness everyone said to me (even I said to me) we have to have faith that everything will be alright. But you see, I don’t have faith. And today I managed to put into words what’s been at the back of my mind this whole time, I have no clue whether the husband is going to get better. Days like today make us feel like this illness will never end, will never go away, that he’ll never really be better, that we can never relax and plan for our future because we have no clue whether there is a future to be had at all. But the thing is, we don’t know because we can’t know. We can’t plan for our future with absolute certainty because there is no certainty. You can be fine, be perfectly healthy, leave for work and die in a car crash. But this doesn’t mean you stop planning, you stop living. I’m writing about faith today because I wish I could convince myself that there is a higher power, a grand design, a puppet master of sorts, but I can’t and it makes me a little sad. I don’t know if the husband is going to get better or worse, no one does, but I wish that I could hold on to some sort of faith system that allowed me to believe he’ll get better, because it would make this time easier, because sometimes believing something will happen is enough. As I’m writing more things come to mind so I’m thinking this post will be one of a series, cause if I keep writing this will become less a blog post and more a tome and I don’t want to put anyone to sleep quite yet. For now I ask you this, do you have faith and does it help you get through the rough patches?

Living with Leukemia. The other side of the story - part 4 Broken

I’ve been having a really hard time with this blog lately. When I first started it I debated for quite some time whether I wanted to tell the people I know about it because I felt I needed a place where I could speak my mind, including the unmentionables, in relative anonymity. But then my egomaniacal side got the best of me and I went and opened my big mouth and told all and sundry about my new blog that I was so excited about. So now I have nowhere to vent. Sigh. Though probably better this way cause it keeps me from writing something stupid, or that I’ll regret.

Anyway, back to the point of this post. I have writer’s block. So soon…. The main reason for it is that winter up and started and I was not prepared. Let me explain, basically, I’m making wrong associations. It got very cold here, it started snowing, the girl turned one, thanksgiving came and went and we’ve decorated the house for Christmas. Every day that passes, every minute, we’re inexorably moving closer to the day that our lives came crushing down around us and I’m scared.

It started snowing, and I started flipping out because of all the negative emotions that snow now evokes… awesome effect considering we live in a place where snow is not the exception to the rule come wintertime. So when it snows, my heart gets heavy, my breathing shallow and my stomach clenches, I have so much to look forward to since it generally stops snowing in April here. I have a million examples, yet none are all too interesting to read, it’s just, well, I have writer’s block. I don’t know what to say.

The husband and I are going to couple’s counseling because things between us are off kilter. I’m not going to say much more about this because, well, he may not want this stuff to be made public. All I will say is that we were off kilter before the leukemia, but I guess we both hoped that this illness, this shock, this journey we’re on together, whether we want to be or not, would realign us, would fix us, would make us realize what is really important in life. It didn’t. If anything it made things worst.

Typical. You would think we could possibly take some time and just enjoy life, our family and each other right now but fate is such as it is and the universe has an interesting sense of humor. So there you have it, we’re broken,  I have writer’s block, so you’ll be reading some pretty erratic stuff on here for now. Bear with me. I’ll be back, and I’ll at least try to keep the nonsense funny!

Vairy, vairy Hairy

I’ve got a hairy leg dilemma. You see, my legs are very, very hairy right now. To the point that I have to wear pants, tights just don’t cut it as I now have the hairiness poking through and it looks like I’m wearing weird angora tights. In fact, I hadn’t really noticed the state of my legs, as the husband and I are on hiatus due to health issues right now, and all the extra hair actually just helped keep me warm what with the first snow falling and all. In truth, the only reason I even noticed was because I wore a dress on Thanksgiving with black tights and halfway through dinner looked down and thought, what’s with all the fuzz on my tights? Aaack, how did my legs get so hairy??!!

So what’s the dilemma, you may ask. Well, you see, I hate shaving, it’s time consuming (once I start I have to do it every day, cause the only thing I hate more than vairy hairy legs is spiky legs), I live in Italy, hence my shower is tiny, hence when I bend down to shave my legs I get the whole rear on cold tile effect, which frankly is bothersome as I’m already bothered cause of the having to shave thing. I usually wax, but this entails me making (and keeping) an appointment, leaving the kiddos and driving twenty minutes to the appointment… etc, basically wasting 3 hours when the whole thing takes at most thirty minutes. Also, if you’ve never waxed before you may not know this, but the longer the hair, the more painful the procedure. Right now, I would probably need an epidural to get through it. So, what do I do? No, really, what do I do?  It’s just, well, honestly it’s getting embarrassing, I went to pilates on Friday and spent half the session readjusting my pant leg so you couldn’t see my hairy ankles. The indecision… it’s driving me nuts. Plus, the longer I wait the harder it is to just get it done. And then I start thinking, maybe I’ll forget about my legs, simply basking in the added warmth of my natural leg warmers, and then the husband and I will decide it’s time to end the hiatus, and after all the issues with his health, literally surviving cancer, I’m going to end up killing him with a heart attack from utter horror.